3000 Miles of Blood

Being a woman who lived during the eighteen hundreds, you’d think I could tell you a whole lot about life when dysentery was a thing people still worried about. When women were still very much beneath men and same gender attraction was basically hush-hush, behind-closed-doors, rarely ever heard of.

I could tell you how much I hated the clothing, the neck-wringing bonnets, or how I slept through the Civil War, World War 1 and even most of World War 2. I know, pretty fucked right?

What I really wish I could recall are the faces of my birth parents. My father, my mother, and whether I had any siblings. Not that it matters now, anyway. They’re all long dead. But there is one person I do remember quite well.

I remember how she had me chained to the stone walls of some dungeon in a one thousand year old castle in the middle of bumfuck-nowhere. How she’d starve me for days, even weeks sometimes—all some screwed up lesson in self-control and restraint. I won’t ever pretend to understand her methods, but it was the taunting that dug the deepest. It was all those terrible things she said about me, the way she treated me like an animal, all the way up until the day she died—by my hand.

Life was simpler after that. I moved to a place called Crystal Falls in northern Florida and for a time, a couple handfuls of decades, really, it was all smooth sailing or whatever. I integrated myself into society. I watched life and humanity evolve through the fifties all the way beyond the millennium.

Smartphones, the Internet, all pretty sweet additions to the human condition, you know? And you’d never catch me out on a Sunday night, ‘cause I’d be damned if I ever missed an episode of The Walking Dead.

But everything changed for me one night a little over a week ago. I told myself I was sick and tired of sucking down raccoon blood. I needed to taste human again. I needed it just once. Maybe I should’ve paid a little more attention to my sire, who knows. Who the fuck cares, now, anyway? It’s not like it matters.

My life changed when I found myself in an alleyway downtown with some dude’s pants around his ankles draining that sweet red out of his femoral artery. Sure, you might think it’s kinda dickish for me to trick a guy into thinking he’s about to get sucked off, but you gotta understand how badly I needed a taste.

I don’t even like guys like that, okay? And fuck, I’m a vampire, after-all.

But then I met a girl, and then I crashed my car, killed a few people and, now? I’m writing this because I don’t know if I’m going to make it back alive. Whatever that means, “Alive.” I guess it’s subjective, nowadays.

Not that a road trip from Florida to Los Angeles is death defying or anything. It’s what’s on the opposite end of that journey that’s got me all anxious. Werewolves are apparently really good at dispatching bloodsuckers, if the past few days are of any testament to that unfortunate goddamn fact. But they’ve got Celia, and I’ll be fucking damned if I’m going to just allow them to turn her and maybe even use her against me.

The only advantage I’ve got is that they won’t even see me coming. Chalk that up to the douchebag who thought he’d killed me. Nah. You just pissed me off.

And I’m coming for you. All of you.

Check out the ongoing rough draft of 3000 Miles of Blood over on Wattpad!

Meryl S. Kavanagh is an independent author, an artist and an independent music producer. She is also a lesbian transgender woman working hard to stake her claim amidst a national climate that barely even wants her to exist. You can support her efforts via Patreon and you can find all of her previously released books and albums on Amazon, Google Play and Apple iBooks/iTunes (for books, search Meryl S. Kavanagh and for music, search Eyeshadow 2600 FM).